J-20 Mighty Dragon – Trumpeter

This is the Trumpeter release of the J-20, the Chinese Stealth fighter.

The only other kit available in 1/48 is the Meng kit, which from what I’ve heard is a better kit.

I didn’t really take in progress picture much, as this was pretty much straight from the box build. The only items added were a bit of cabling and doo-dads for the ejections seat and canopy area. As the seat as depicted wasn’t a very good match for reference pictures. With such a new aircraft, reference pictures in general were hard to come by. The heads up display was sprayed with Tamiya clear green.

The fit of the kit was just ok, some areas were perfect, some tolerances were just too tight – but could be user error on my part. Most of the time was spent on the painting the splinter scheme. I preshaded with black primer and then used the intensity of the 3 different grays to give variation to the paint. Photos showed well maintained aircrafts but definitely had some ‘dirt and smudges’ during usuage. An oil wash was used to bring out the panel.

The kit provided full set of missiles in the interior missile bay along with the side Air to Air PL-15 missiles that can be displayed outside while their doors are closed. First time I’ve seen that on any airplane. The exhausts were painted with Titanium and burnt iron. The ‘movable rear fins’ and side canards weren’t really designed well, much too lose and probably should have been sanded and glued so it can’t move. Finally, I messed up the canopy detonation code a bit, but I rang out of steam and called it done.